Push Notifications

A push notification is a short message that appears on a phone or a computer screen while the person is busy with something else. They never open your app or your website to see it, because the phone puts it in front of them. It is usually one line of text, sometimes a small picture, and a tap that opens the right page.

Only a business the person has agreed to hear from can send one, so the phone or the browser asks first with a small box. The answer is yes or no, and a no means nothing you build later can reach them. That box appears once, so the moment you ask matters more than the wording. Most refusals come from asking on the very first screen, before anyone knows what the app does. Ask after the first booking and far more people say yes.

The messages worth sending are the useful ones, the sort that save the reader a phone call. Your class starts in an hour, your order has left the warehouse, or the dentist has moved your Tuesday appointment to Wednesday. Nadiva sends salon and gym reminders exactly like these, and a chair that would have sat empty gets filled.

iPhones carry one rule that catches people out, because a website can only reach an iPhone if the customer adds it to the home screen first. Hardly anyone does that, so if your customers carry iPhones you need a real app from the App Store. Android phones and desktop browsers are easier, but even there nothing is guaranteed. A phone that is switched off, a quiet setting or a deleted app will all swallow the message. So treat a push as a helpful nudge, never as proof that someone was told.

The fastest way to lose that permission is to send too much, and people rarely complain. They simply switch you off or delete the app, so you never find out why. Two messages a week that a customer actually wants will beat ten that annoy them. Linkysoft asks a client to list every message before we build the sending screen, and about half get cut in that meeting. Whatever survives should go out during working hours, in the customer's own time zone.

None of this gets bolted on at the end. When Linkysoft plans a mobile app project, the notification list is written before the first screen is drawn, because it decides what the system has to know about each customer.